Oscar Mass.Yellow7.com URL

Our last article covered the ins and outs of this mysterious company with a J.J. Abrams name, Massive Dynamics. Since we published the article on the 21st March it has been picked up by numerous sources including CNET and the shares have plummeted from 0.49 to 0.17 (at time of writing). Nobody from Massive Dynamics has ever contacted us, as per our request at the end of the last article.

Though press releases have slowed there’s still been ten in the past month. We at Personalize along with sister site TCT have been keeping a close eye on developments and discovered a few more interesting snippets about the departing CEO Oscar Hines.

That’s right we said “departing”, the latest twist in the tale of Massive Dynamics is that Oscar Hines is to step down from his post after just eight months in charge to be replaced by J.J. Howard (The Abrams links never end) of Real-View 3D. We’re not going to get into Real-View 3D suffice to say that the first link from the news section of their own website describes their product as ‘Vaporware’.

The hunt for Massive Oscar

At the time of writing the first article we had inkling as to who Oscar Hines was, but without enough evidence to back it up we didn’t reveal the man behind the Mass. Since, we’ve dug a little deeper and found the image at the top of this page, the URL of which pointed to mass.yellow7.com. We’ll leave you to peruse that hidden page of the Massive Dynamics site, the page where there’s a countdown to the release of FrogPad2, a product conspicuous by its absence from the product section of Massive Dynamics front facing site. UPDATE: Since publishing on April 24th this page has been deleted at time of writing which is one day later. You can see in the image to the left of the page that the same URL containing Oscar's picture still exists.

The image of Oscar Hines on that page firmed up our suspicions and we’ve pinned our man down. Here’s his LinkedIn profile (you may need to login to LinkedIn), Massive Dynamics is, again, conspicuous by its absence. I suppose seeing as he’s the only employee he’s been busy writing those endless press releases?

YouTube star

You’ll see on his profile he’s still the owner and Vice President of a hair and a beauty company respectively (again confirming our suspicions). A YouTube search for ‘Oscar Hines’ gave us a link to the YouTube channel of one of those companies, HealthyBody.cc. We urge you to watch this video, uploaded 11 months ago.

Echoing the Pepsi Challenge ads of yesteryear, Mr Hines asks members of the “unsuspecting” public to hold out their arms while he pushes down on it twice; once holding nothing or water and once holding a product with an artificial sweetener. According to Oscar when just holding a diet cola you instantly become weaker. Even just holding hands with a person who, in turn, is holding hands with a person who is holding a box of artificial sweeteners can make you instantly weaker… “Tripple Fail” (their spelling not ours).

HealthBody healthy mind?

Step away from the comically poor production values and you’ll see they are directing you to their website. On the site one can buy a number of supplements/remedies, which claim to do wild things like enlarge your penis, enhance your breasts or help you lose weight. Of the tens of products on the site we’ve not been able to find one that has been tested by the FDA but they’ve got this handy disclaimer to cover their backs:

The information provided herein should not be construed as a health-care diagnosis, treatment regimen or any other prescribed health-care advice or instruction. The information is provided with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in the practice of medicine or any other health-care profession and does not enter into a health-care practitioner/patient relationship with its readers.

Diet, health and sex supplements/remedies account for a huge portion of internet swindles. Danny Lee Frost, MHRA (The UK equivalent to the FDA) Head of Operations told us “Buying medicines from an unregulated source could mean you don’t know what you’re getting, where it came from or if it’s safe to take. The dose could be too high or too low, putting your health at risk.

“The bottom line is that there are no quick fixes when it comes to your health. Take the time to see your GP (physician), pharmacist or other healthcare professional to identify the cause of your symptoms. You are far more likely to get better faster if you are on the correct course of prescribed medication.”

Back to Massive Dynamics

How you leap from penis-enlargement to a company that claims to have invented Web 4.0, whatever that is, is beyond us. But that’s what Mr Hines managed, albeit for eight short months.

In that time Mr Hines has seen the launch of no less than five products, though we’re yet to see evidence of four of them and the other is a phone case.

Since Massive Dynamics launched their “3D Printing Division” on February 27th Oscar Hines has released 19 press releases, in that same period 3D Systems have released 12, Stratasys have released 7 and ExOne have released 4. Incidentally, not one press release has had an image to accompany it, which is most unusual.

Each press release has come with a claim that we’ve never been able to verify. We’ve tried to contact Real-View 3D to no avail, we’ve emailed Felix the Cat Productions to see if Massive Dynamics had acquired the rights to Felix the Cat, we’ve even tried to get in touch with Business Wire who publish their press releases and also attempted to communicate with Massive Dynamics’ web-hosting company Yellow7. We’ve been met with radio silence from the get go.

All this may seem like a witch-hunt, but concerned investors who have pumped hard earned funds into Massive Dynamics have contacted us. As journalists it seems only right that we follow this up and try to get to the bottom of a company appearing, for all intents and purposes, to ride on the crest of a 3D printing wave.

We would love for new CEO J.J. Howard or departing CEO Oscar Hines to get in touch and perhaps explain some of our findings, though seeing as we invited them to comment 32 hours before publishing this we doubt that will ever happen.